Kafka Reliability Engineer

Be | Shaping the Future Poland has a proven position of being a reliable partner for financial services organisations to analyse complex requirements, find solutions and implement them in their entirety, regardless of their complexity. Since the foundation of Be Poland in 2013, we have been continually expanding and customising our spectrum of services. Today, we are privileged to have in our team the best individuals in each sector we operate within the financial services industry.
Role: Senior SRE / Platform Engineer with Kafka
Location: fully remote from Poland
Contract Type: B2B
We are looking for experienced Senior SRE / Platform Engineers with Kafka to support a production readiness initiative for a critical booking processing platform. The assignment focuses on improving reliability, observability, resilience, and operational excellence across distributed systems and event-driven architectures. The ideal candidate combines strong hands-on experience with Kafka-based systems, observability tooling, cloud-native deployments, and Site Reliability Engineering practices.
Key Responsibilities
Observability & Monitoring
Define and implement monitoring strategies based on Golden Signals
Design and maintain dashboards, metrics, alerts, and reporting
Improve centralized logging and distributed tracing capabilities
Develop alerting rules, thresholds, and operational runbooks
Support on-call processes and incident response activities
Kafka Reliability & Messaging
Design and optimize Kafka topics, partitioning strategies, and consumer groups
Implement retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues (DLQ), and idempotent processing
Define schema governance and messaging standards
Monitor Kafka performance, consumer lag, and throughput
Improve reliability of asynchronous workflows, including backpressure handling and failure recovery
Reliability Engineering & SRE Practices
Define and manage SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
Participate in incident management and post-mortem activities
Drive reliability-by-design principles across services and platforms
Identify and implement improvements that reduce operational overhead
Release & Deployment
Support CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
Implement quality gates and release management processes
Work with Canary, Blue-Green, and rollback strategies
Support feature flag frameworks and version management
Collaborate on load testing and production readiness assessments
Work with container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes
Data Protection & Disaster Recovery
Define backup and restore strategies
Support disaster recovery planning and testing
Contribute to RPO/RTO definitions and operational procedures
Participate in DR exercises and resilience testing
Required Skills & Experience
Strong experience as an SRE, Platform Engineer, DevOps Engineer, or Reliability Engineer
Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka in production environments
Experience with monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability platforms
Knowledge of distributed systems and event-driven architectures
Experience with Kubernetes and containerized environments
Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
Understanding of incident management and operational excellence practices
Experience with MongoDB, including replication and backup concepts
Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
Fluent English
Nice to Have
Experience in financial services or other highly regulated environments
Experience with distributed tracing solutions
Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
Experience implementing SLO/SLI frameworks
Certifications related to Kubernetes, cloud technologies, or SRE practices
German language
Our offer:
Competitive remuneration on B2B contract
Access to Mindgram – mental health & well-being platform
Free gym at Q22
Personal development – internal online / onsite DevTalks
Referral bonus program
International environment

Work arrangement
No